
' E 
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THE PURITAN SPIRTf: 



CHARLES WELLINGTON STONE. 



AN ORATION 



DELIVERED IN 



TEMPLETON, MASS., 



JULY 4, 1876. 



^1 



THE PURITAN SPIRIT 



BY 



CHARLES WELLINGTON STONE. 



b:z^ 



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Press of Geo. H. Ellis, ioi Milk St., Boston. 



VBtaiOWIl 



THE CENTENNIAL CELEBEATION. 

By vote of the town of Templeton, April 3, 1876, an 
appropriation was made for celebrating the centennial anni- 
versary of American Independence. To carry this into 
effect, a Committee was chosen, consisting of 

Mr, Francis Leland; 

Capt. Charles W. Davis ; 

Mr. Charles A. Perley; 

Rev. Edwin G; Adam^'; 

Mr. Thomas T, Greenwood ; 

Mr. Elisha C. Farnsworth ; 

Mr. Lucien N. Hadley. 

At sunrise, noon, and sunset, on the fourth of July, the bells 
were rung and national salutes were fired. A procession was 
formed, consisting of the East Templeton Cornet Band, a 
company of " Red-coats " from East Templeton, the officials 
of the day, the clergy and present and past town officers, the 
schools of the town, a company of ".Continentals " from 
Otter River, citizens, and a company of " Minute-men " from 
the Centre. The procession marched to a bower erected for 
the occasion on the Common, and there the exercises of the 
forenoon were held. The President of the Day was Mr. 



Francis Leland : the Marshal of the Day was Col. George 
P. Hawkes : prayer was offered by Rev. Charles A. White : 
the Declaration of Independence was read by Mr. Percival 
Blodgett : the Orator of the Day was Mr. Charles W. Stone : 
music by a chorus and by the children of the public schools 
was directed by Capt. Charles W. Davis. A free collation 
prepared by the ladies of the town was served in the bower, 
after which addresses were made by Rev. Edwin G. Adams, 
Rev, L. Payson Broad, Hon. Giles H. Whitney of Winchen- 
don, Hon. Jason Goulding of Phillipston, and Capt. V. P. 
Parkhurst. In the afternoon a company from Baldwinville 
in costume represented the exploits of a band of Indian 
warriors. In the early evening a concert was given in the 
church of the First Parish. After dark there was a fine 
exhibition of fireworks. Flags were displayed on the Com- 
mon and the houses were generally decorated. About two 
thousand people were present during the day, and the utmost 
good order prevailed throughout. 

On the following Sunday, July 9th, a centennial union 
religious service was held at the church of the First Parish, 
by five congregations of the town with their respective minis- 
ters and choirs, with the following order of exercises ; 

ANTHEM: "Blessed be the name of the Lord." 

INVOCATION; 
By Rev. L. P. Broad, of the Congregational Church, Baldwinville. 

READING OF SCRIPTURE; 
By Rev. F. S. Bacon, of the Baptist Church. 



5 

HYMN: Te Deum. 
" O God, we praise thee and confess." 

PRAYER; 
By Rev. E. G. Adams, of the First Congregational Church. 

HYMN : " My country, 'tis of thee." 

SERMON; 
By Rev. R. W. Harlow, of the Methodist Church. 

HYMN : " Let children hear the mighty deeds." 

ADDRESS; 
By Rev. E. G. Adams. 

ADDRESS; 
By Rev. L. P. Broad. 

ADDRESS AND PRAYER; 
By Rev. G. BuSHNELL, formerly pastor of the Universalist Church. 

Singing of " The Star-Spangled Banner " by the chorus, under the 
direction of Capt. C. W. Davis. 

BENEDICTION; 
By Rev. R. W. Harlow. 



ORATION. 

Children, Ladies, Gentlemen; fellow citize;ns of 

MY NATIVE town; 

I am deeply moved now, as I have been these past 
weeks, by the thought of holding such a position as this ; 
for to stand here as I do today, to represent the town of 
Templeton on the day our country is a hundred years 
old, is not only the greatest honor that has ever come to 
me, but the greatest honor life can bring. 

While I can never call any place but this my real 
home, I have yet lived away from here long enough to 
relieve any opinion I may have of Templeton from the 
suspicion of coming from local prejudice; and I have 
perhaps known communities enough to be able to form a 
reasonably correct estimate of this one. And it is borne 
in upon me more and more as the years go by that this 
might be taken for the typical, the representative New 
England town. What should such a town be ? A town 
of character ; a town of public spirit ; a town free from 
the boyishness that characterizes so many villages of a 
later growth ; a town in earnest. Such a town our 
Templeton has always been. 



8 

In these centennial days, when all our minds are 
turned to the events of a hundred years ago, we find in 
them nothing which is new or unfamiliar. From our 
earliest years these stories of our past have been to us 
as household words. But not one among them all comes 
to us like a twice told tale. There is a freshness about 
them that is never lost. We never tire of hearing them. 
Whence comes this undying charm ? What is there in 
the fact that a body of men charged three times up a 
hill, and the third time drove its occupants from the 
summit, that should make it so interesting to us when 
told or read for the hundredth time ? It is more than 
the feeling always roused by the contemplation of what 
is far in the past; the feeling that invests all things of a 
bygone day, however prosaic and realistic at the time, 
with an interest always poetic, and bordering on the ro- 
mantic. It is this. The spirit that animated one side 
of those combatants was such as to keep these memo- 
ries ever green. They cannot die. 

Our country has passed through so much that the 
deeds we are commemorating seem far removed ; but it 
is easy to feel what a little space has been occupied in 
the story of our world by these great events. When we 
think of the ages for which life has existed on this 
Earth, our imagination almost fails us. When we come 
to reflect upon the nature of time, we are brought face 
to face with conceptions so stupendous that many think- 
ers seem to wish to shun them by exclaiming that time 
is only an idea. 



It is really not a long time since America's indepen- 
dence was declared : it is not long from that day we 
celebrate back to the landing of the Pilgrims on 
Plymouth Rock : it is not long to the date when Eng- 
lishmen were recognized in Magna Charta as freemen 
nor from then to the time when the Anglo-Saxons moved 
to England from northern Germany; nor from then to 
the obscure days when the remotest of our known ances- 
tors ceased to roam the Persian highlands. We cannot 
pause there. Those nomadic tribes had many of the 
ruder arts of life ; and back we must go in our thoughts 
to the impenetrable ages when human life was wholly 
savage ; back till we come to life not human but animal ; 
backward through lower and lower forms till all existing 
life is that of plants ; backward till the land has not 
appeared on the face of the Earth. Shut our eyes ; and 
our globe is seen one waste of clouds and green waters, 
rolling onward in silent majesty; bearing in itself the 
seeds of its glorious future. But we cannot stop even 
there. Backward and backward we must think, till we 
can picture the Earth as a round fluid mass of immense 
extent ; farther and farther till it has no existence of its 
own, but forms part of an almost boundless cloud of gas. 
Even this we find to be but as a dot in infinite space ; 
and the mind sinks, faint in the endeavor to fathom 
infinitude. 

We can trace the working of the eternal laws by 
which our planet has been evolved ; by which life has 
been developed, from lowest forms to ever higher ones ; 



10 

by which brutes have been raised to savages and savages 
to men. But what is it that has broughjt man from the 
repulsive barbarism of past ages to his present higli 
estate ? "VVe can call it immutable law if we will ; but 
what is this immutable law ? It is that all man's 
advancement must come in one way ; and that is 
through Conscious Human Effort. 

All progress, all virtue, is some form of self-denial ; 
all degeneration, all sin, some form of self-indulgence ; 
and for all that mankind is today we are indebted to the 
exertions, the sacrifices, the self-denial in some form, of 
those who have gone before us. Our present state is 
the resultant of the inclinations of the natural man and 
of the self-denial of our predecessors which has set those 
inclinations aside. 

In all ages of history there have not been wanting 
individuals, communities, even nations, that have pos- 
'i sessed this spirit of resistance to wrong and self-indul- 
\ gence in every form, in obedience to the promptings of 
what is unseen, and for the sake of those who were to 
come after them ; but the spirit has never taken forms 
so high, so broad, and so lasting, as in the Anglo-Saxon 
race ; and never so much so as in that part of our race 
from which came the New England Puritans. 

This it is which in its broadest sense I am pleased to 
call The Puritan Spirit. 

One of the most moving pictures that has come down 
to us from our colonial period is that of the aged Brad- 
street, called by the electors of Massachusetts Bay to 



II 

the Governor's Chair. The venerable form which meets 
our mind's eye is that of one standing alone in his day 
and generation. Those who had held the place before 
him, Dudley, Bellingham, and Leverett, with Winthrop 
and Endicott, were sleeping in their graves. Of those 
who had laid the foundations of our state and our 
nation, he alone was left. His solitary figure, with the 
hoary hair and the snow-white beard, is the vanishing 
point of the first generation of New Englanders. Men 
called him the last of the Puritans ; and when he w^as 
gathered, we can hardly say unto his fathers, but unto 
his brethren, they said The last of the Puritans is gone. 

But Bradstreet was not the last of the Puritans ; and 
the Puritan Spirit did not die with him. It lived after 
him; lives still; and will live. All that passed away 
with America's first generation, that race of men who 
seemed as of granite, was the result of the circum- 
stances that bound them. Their austerity was not the 
fruit of the Spirit, but the product of the hard stern 
destiny they had to face. And when the austerity could 
go, -and a milder age come in, the Spirit was not extin- 
guished but only broadened by the change. It was the 
form and not the substance that dropped away. 

Hutchinson was deceived, and those with him. He 
thought the Puritan Spirit was slumbering in the graves 
of Bradstreet and his brethren ; but in the years which 
culminated in the Revolution he found it none the less 
inflexible for not having constantly obtruded itself. The 
smoothing of its sharp and rugged outlines had not 



12 

destroyed it, but had given it new possibilities. The 
Puritan Spirit has more forms than one. It breathes 
not for one age alone. The Puritan Spirit is perennial. 

On the seventeenth of June, hardly more than a year 
ago, as I sat in Boston for hour after hour and saw mile 
after mile of that great procession go by, it seemed that 
in the whole-hearted demonstrations of that day there 
lay a deep significance ; a significance which no other 
day of the year and no other place in the Union could 
have given. For here, here in this very city through 
whose streets was sweeping that grand pageant, symbol- 
izing for our country, not by any appointment, but from 
the common impulse of all, reconciliation and reunion, 
had originated and grown up those ideas, which, perme- 
ating Massachusetts, uniting New England in one, 
leavening the whole North, at last gathered irresistible 
force, and swept from the face of our broad land that 
most gigantic shame. 

We in these latter days saw with our eyes and heard 
with our ears what was the grandest outpouring of the 
Puritan Spirit the world has ever known. The spectacle 
was sublime, and one which stands alone in the world's 
history. 

Our war was not for war's sake. It was not for con- 
quest or any national aggrandizement : to such a contest 
there may attach a national feeling which can perhaps 
be called patriotism, though of the least noble kind. 
Nor was it even a heroic struggle for self-defence : in 
such a war we should have stood by the side of many a 



13 

brave and noble people that has given or perilled its all 
for national existence. Our war does stand alone. For 
never before did a great people thus rise like one man, 
for a principle ; never before did half a million men rush 
to arms, for an idea. 

Then in truth something new under the sun was added 
to the world's experience. Europe might well gaze and 
learn. 

John Stuart Mill, in his Political Economy, speaking 
of America, had said that a state of society was certainly 
not to be admired which made of one half a nation dol- 
lar hunters and of the other half breeders of dollar 
hunters. A more withering blasting judgment, upon a 
people not wholly devoid of sensibility, could hardly 
have been uttered. But John Stuart Mill did gaze and 
learn ; and what was the result .'' In a new edition of 
his book, that man who always said what he meant and 
meant what he said withdrew those bitter scornful 
words, and said America had proved herself capable of 
higher things. 

It might indeed have seemed to a foreigner, during 
those dreary years \vhich most of you remember so well, 
that the Puritan Spirit was dead. To many here at 
home it must have seemed so. But at last the uprising 
did come ; and 

" The nation, on whose fate the whole world hung, 
Faced her inevitable problem then ; 
The dreaded problem, shunned while she was young ; 
And in that hour she found her sons were men : 
They died ; but in their death we all breathe free again." 



H 

To the almost passionate attachment which the true 
■Bostonian has for his city there is a basis which is firm 
and enduring. There is nothing superficial about it. 
No mere clinging to locality, no mere liking for the 
town we chance to have always known, could rouse and 
keep alive the feelings we hold for our city. 

Boston has always been the mark for a sort of raillery 
from the rest of the country ; and I think we should all 
be sorry if it should ever cease to be so ; for beneath 
the sportive thrust there is a tribute paid, and a tribute 
which is seldom wholly concealed. 

And by no means is the real Boston confined to the 
city limits. It takes us all in. These country towns 
which formed part of the Massachusetts colony can no 
more be disconnected from Boston than can the city 
suburbs. They all form part of an organic whole, 
throughout which the circulation never ceases ; Boston 
constantly taking in and Boston as constantly giving out. 

Here has always been for the continent the centre and 
the source of the Puritan Spirit ; and the fact has been 
always felt, and always recognized, though sometimes 
silently. 

On the afternoon of that sixteenth of June, when the 
city and the hills around lay in all their fresh summer 
loveliness, two Confederate officers were walking the 
streets. They had never been here before. One of 
them said to the other, "If we had known what sort of 
a city Boston was, we could have told we could not 
conquer." That man had seen more than streets. 



15 

bricks, trees, hills. He had seen beneath the surface. 
The Puritan Spirit is among us. 

The Puritan Spirit is slow. Like all great and noble 
fruit, it matures gradually. But when the Spirit moves, 
the result is assured. It may be long in coming, but 
come it will. 

For how many long and weary years, from King Wil- 
liam to the Revolution, did our forefathers struggle with 
their foes from the north. How often came bitter dis- 
appointment in the efforts to rid themselves of their 
ancient enemy. But when once the issue was fairly 
marked between a state planted as ours had been and a 
colony reared on such foundations as those of Canada, 
the result was as well settled as it was on the day when 
the children's children attained the object for which 
New England had toiled and hoped so long. 

When once the issue was fairly marked between 
America and Great Britain, the result, as far as this part 
of the country was concerned, was decided. John 
Adams wrote, at the outbreak of the Revolution, " New 
England alone can carry on this war for years." And 
she could have, and would have. Had France refused 
to take our part ; had the central and southern states 
withdrawn from the unequal contest ; New England 
would not have yielded. The concentrated power of the 
British Empire might have crushed her, but it could not 
have subdued her. 

When once the issue was fairly marked fifteen years 
ago between North and South, the result could have 



i6 

been equally well foreseen. We often speak of Gettys- 
burg as the decisive battle of the war; as if then and 
there the question of ultimate victory was settled. But 
what if that last desperate struggle on the slope of Cem- 
etery Hill had not broken the rebel line.'' Merely this. 
Some other place than southern Pennsylvania would 
have witnessed the turning of the tide. New England 
would no more have yielded then than she would have a 
hundred years ago. 

So it will always be. Whenever there shall be a con- 
test in which one side is actuated by the spirit of the 
Puritans, the end cannot be doubtful. 

Many look forward with dread to a possible struggle 
in the future with influences which have their origin and 
their head abroad. Perhaps we are not likely to be 
forced to use any weapons therein but those of peace ; 
but whatever comes, there can be but one result. 

This certainty has come from the very slowness with 
which that Spirit makes its way. Many a year of abuse 
must have been needed to make the Pilgrims ready to 
turn their faces from their homes ; but when the step 
was taken, there was no faltering. Many a year of in- 
justice and insolence it took to bring Massachusetts to 
the point of severing the ties which bound her to the 
mother land ; but that nineteenth of April saw her sep- 
arated forever. Many a year of what our Emerson has 
called plantation manners had to pass, before patient New 
England was bullied into a sense of her duty and a sense 
of her power ; but the firing on Sumter was the begin- 
ning of the end. 



17 

Through this slowness of action and power of endur- 
ance, the Puritan Spirit can accomplish what would 
otherwise be impossible. 

If the conditions of the Battle of Bunker Hill had 
been different by merely a supply of ammunition on the 
American side, there is every reason to suppose that the 
British would have been, not only defeated, but utterly 
routed. It would have been a defeat perhaps without a 
parallel in the annals of British warfare. But if the 
Americans had had their powder, and had broken the 
British power in America then and there, it would have 
been impossible to attain the grand results which the 
Revolution did attain. Those subsequent years of mu- 
tual suffering and sacrifice were all needed to bring the 
disjointed fragments which then made up America into 
relations close enough to make nationality possible. 

If the Battle of Bull Run, instead of opening up as it 
did our protracted war, had crushed the Rebellion in its 
youth, the great work of the War would have been but 
half done ; and the questions that are now laid away for- 
ever would have remained, more involved and perplexing 
than ever, for us and for our children. The North had 
to be taught by those years of trial the full extent and 
significance of the contest she was engaged in ; and the 
knowledge could not have come to her in a month or a 
year. 

In spite of the seemingly great length of time it took 
for this last and greatest work of the Spirit, when we 
come to measure its gigantic effects we can only wonder 



that the time required was so short. When we, who are 
young now, try to put ourselves into the modes of 
thought and feehng of even thirty-five or forty years 
ago, we find ourselves almost in a new world, so differ- 
ent does it all seem. We have indeed lived along fast in 
these years. 

The working of the Spirit seems like the growth of 
an Agave, a century plant ; which for slow years is stead- 
ily storing up power ; laying away provision for future 
exertion ; and when the time for fruiting comes, pours it 
all forth with marvellously vigorous and rapid effect. 
I The Puritan Spirit is long-suffering. 

The Puritan Spirit is unmindful of self. To ancient 
I Athens we are rightly pointed for an example in past 
times of a thoroughly patriotic commonwealth. But 
how the charm of contemplating her history is marred, 
when we come to read that after the Battle of Salamis 
they took a vote to decide who deserved greatest honor 
for the part taken in the salvation of the state, and every 
Athenian commander proceeded to vote for himself. 

And this is not the worst. The patriotism of a Greek 
commonly lasted only so long as his own ambitions could 
be gratified. When his selfish aims were crossed, he 
seems to have had no scruples about allying hirnself with 
the hordes of Asia and turning his arms against his 
native land. The worst enemy Greece had always to 
face was treachery at home. If Benedict Arnold had 
been an Athenian, he could not have held the solitary 
distinction he does with us : he would have had abun- 



19 

dant companionship. If we turn from Greece to Rome, 
while we find fewer who are ready to lead foreigners 
against their country, mark well how often the dying 
speech of the Roman patriot bids his survivors reflect 
how hard it will be to get along without him. The Pur- 
itan Spirit looks beyond. 

The Puritan Spirit would leave no sting behind. 
Even when, as in our last war, it has had to crush what 
opposes it, it does it in no rancorous way ; and those 
who were sternest in the resolve to carry through the 
contest uncompromisingly to the end are the very ones 
that now stand first and foremost in the endeavor to put 
aside all feelings of hostility and bring about lasting 
good -will. , 

But the work once accomplished is work that must en- 
dure. Nothing can reverse the decision once arrived at ; 
and in that certainty we rest. This very last winter, 
when some Representatives at Washington seemed do- 
ing their utmost to embitter the feelings of friendship 
that had been so rapidly forming, why was it that the 
outrageous assertion that Andersonville prison had been 
a reasonably humane place so completely failed to awaken 
resentment in the North ? It was because we knew well 
that the work of those cruel years had been done for all 
time. The fruits of all those sacrifices were beyond the 
reach of harm. That it was which made the North seem 
almost apathetic. And as to the one specific fact, let no 
Union soldier fear it will go down to posterity misrepre- 
sented. We who are men now were boys then. But 



20 

boys have eyes that can see ; and we saw those men 
come home. When the children of '63 and '4 shall have 
passed three score and ten and disappeared from among 
our successors, then will be time enough to send forth to 
the world, and have it believed, that the horrors of the 
Southern prison pen were a myth. But it is not from 
the North, or not from the true North, that any taunts 
will come. The Puritan Spirit would leave no sting be- 
hind. 

The Puritan Spirit is fair-minded. Nothing is de- 
tracted from its own grandeur when full credit is given to 
the members of the English Church of two hundred and 
fifty years ago for their virtues and their conscientious- 
ness ; to the loyalists of one hundred years ago for their 
worth and their fidelity ; to the Southern brethren of our 
own day for their sincerity and their steadfastness. It is 
not at men that the Puritan Spirit strikes, but at the 
wrongs men uphold. 

The Puritan Spirit, to be understood, must be looked 
at with the eye of sympathy. Its nobility does not lie 
on the surface ; and distorted views of it are easy enough 
to take. Such a view is the one presented in a book 
written by one who was once our own townsman. It 
passes for the book of all books for preserving to us the 
features of the old New England life. But that book, or 
at least the part of it which purports to portray our fore- 
fathers, could not have been written by that man's best 
self. In putting forth such a picture, he must have been 
conscious that he was giving not a portrait but a carica- 
ture. 



21 

The Puritan Spirit always finds its heroes. In each 
of the three great periods of its manifestation it has cre- 
ated the men who were to work its behests. It found 
Winthrop, Endicott, Bradford ; though in those early 
democracies it seems invidious to mention names. It 
found John Adams, Samuel Adams, Hancock, Warren, 
Otis, Washington. It found Lincoln, Sumner, Andrew, 
Charles Francis Adams. Others would have been called 
if these had not been at hand. The Puritan Spirit is 
bound to find its outlet. 

The Puritan Spirit is not sectional. The New Eng- 
land of our day sometimes receives commiseration from 
other parts of the country for the alleged loss of her 
power ; for the so called decline of her influence in the 
national councils. The compassion is not wanted. 
Those who think they have seen the decay of the New 
England influence in the country fail to see deeply. If 
all New England had remained here in these six little 
states while a great nation from other sources grew up 
about her, her power would indeed have dwindled. But 
it is from New England's own flesh and blood that this 
great nation has sprung. What she did by her expan- 
sion was to keep her power, not lose it. 

America is spoken of as formed by the union of all 
nationalities of the earth. In part it is true, and in part 
not. For just as our noble mother tongue, containing as 
it does such treasures drawn from varied languages, is 
built on a framework thoroughly and unchangeably 
Anglo-Saxon, just so our nation, having received it as 



22 

has such rich contributions from all lands, still remains 
thoroughly and unchangeably Anglo-Saxon, Our last 
war settled the questions of basis. New England is 
America and America New England. The Puritan 
f Spirit is American. 

A true Centennial does not dwell wholly on the past. 
It gazes upon the past reverently and admiringly, and 
then turns to the present with all the past can give. 

The times we are living in are sober times. Our out- 
look is far from bright. This very year, when national 
pride should justly be at its height, when of all times we 
should most exult in the name of American, we have been 
compelled to face revelations so humiliating as to bring 
for the time, almost a willingness to disown our country ; 
almost a shame at being obliged to admit we were Ameri- 
cans. 

Amid all that has recently happened to chill the hopes 
of those who have faith in the possibility of a long-sus- 
tained pure government by the people and for the people, 
wherein lies bur ground of rational confident hope ? It 
/ is in our trust in the vitality, permanence, and power, of 
' the Puritan Spirit. It is in our belief that the Puritan 
Spirit lives and will live, growing purer, nobler, and 
stronger. There lies the hope of our land. The future 
will brighten if we prove true. Revering as we do the 
men we have come together to honor, we must prove our 
sincerity by faithfulness to our own trusts. There is a 
part for one and all ; "and that which men shall be will 
result from what we are." 



23 

We have no call now to offer our lives or our sub- 
stance in the prosecution of a war. The whirlwind of 
strife is passed. But our part is no less essential than 
that of those who faced the tempest ; and our duties are 
arduous too. 

It may be said that in the past the Puritan Spirit has 
had some definite tangible object; while now all is vague. 
Three things at least we can strive steadily for, which 
shall be well defined and anything but vague. 

Let us aim to bring it about that all public dealings, 
with nations or with individuals, whether money is con- 
cerned or not, shall be conducted, not only with exact 
honesty, but with such scrupulous honor that America's 
name shall be above the very suspicion of reproach. 
Secondly, let us aim for a civil service as pure as it was 
under the last Massachusetts President ; whose worthy 
son, I cannot forbear to say, is still among us, ready and 
willing to serve us well if we would only call him. Do 
not let a candid German book have in its power to say 
again that the air of America is infected by a corruption 
of its leading classes only to be parallelled in the most 
abandoned parts of Europe. Finally, let it be made im- 
possible to say in future, as it has been said now, and 
truthfully, that the American Congress, supposed to rep- 
resent our very selves, and which ought to do so, is one 
of the most disreputable legislative bodies in the world. 
The path to these achievements will be anything but 
a pleasant one. The obloquy put upon leaders in anti- 
slavery times, and in all times when un-wished-for sub- 



24 

jects are persistently kept in public view, will be renewed 
in such forms as it can be. Even when, as we have seen 
within a year, one who stands in the very front rank of 
cultured and high-minded Americans has the insight and 
the courage to speak the truth plainly on these matters, 
he is accused from all sides of uttering jibes against his 
country. The Puritan Spirit is going to have abundant 
opportunity. 

But there is no excuse for despair. If corruption and 
shams were never so prevalent before, neither was there 
ever before so earnest and resolute a demand for their 
removal. The undercurrent towards what is true was 
never so deep and strong. 

These things we wish for we can have ; and it is our 
duty to have them. If our next Centennial witness their 
attainment, we shall have proved ourselves worthily de- 
scended from our noble ancestry. 

Could the voice of the fathers come to us now, touch- 
ing our beloved country, what would it bring ? 

" Young men, with whom her destiny now lies, 
Take up the arms which we have used before ; 
And stern defend the heritage we hand you o'er " 



